


Of Their Labor

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/F, Old God Baby - Freeform, Post-Game(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-02
Updated: 2013-04-02
Packaged: 2017-12-07 05:36:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/744869
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff"><p>for dreamer, who prompted me for these two. . .damn i wish i was better at their voices! <3</p></blockquote>





	Of Their Labor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreamerInSilico](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamerInSilico/gifts).



They ate so much birnefruit that Leliana began to taste like it.   
  
She held out slices to Cassandra as they rode, stuck on the end of a small knife, the early summer juice of it vivid and dripping, studded lightly with shiny black seeds. Leliana smiled each time a piece was taken, chewing quietly around her own. Their horses matched in lazy strides, and there were trees enough to keep them occupied in the day and sheltered at night. Her mind calculated the taste that might forever be different now, the certain flavor they’d both taken on because of it, and Cassandra blushed where no one could see.   
  
For weeks she led the tight contingent of soldiers and wagons toward Val Royeaux, and so no one saw.  
  
Their discreet passage away from the Imperial Highway bore them west when it didn’t twist northward, and their days passed better as the yellowed fields above Cumberland surrendered to fruit trees and meadows. The wagon wheels whined over thick roots, upthrust to confound the old, hidden roads through Nevarra, and a month of snatching down every birnefruit they found left them hungry for newer things.  
  
When there was more dust between them than conversation, stirred by the steady clop of hooves, Cassandra would prod Leliana about the new Inquisitor.  
  
“Will she obey her directives, or will we be saddled with a rogue?” she asked, eyes on the brown braid of road leading through the thicket.   
  
“But you have been,” replied Leliana, smiling down at the paring knife, voice thick as tanglevine honey. “Saddled by a rogue, I mean. To great satisfaction, if I recall.”  
  
There would be no backward glance, no red-cheeked chance at catching her soldiers dropping eaves. Cassandra pressed.  
  
“Weak or stout?” she asked, more to herself than anything. Should the Inquisitor have been a dwarf wielding a loaf of bread Cassandra would not be surprised. Nothing worked as it had before, and her lessons had been in a tradition that meant so little now. Stories became truth, and truths exploded or fell thrall to magic. And madness.   
  
Leliana whickered softly, gigging her horse closer.  
  
“Does that matter so much?” she asked. “Her strengths are not only physical. Much like you.”  
  
“I prefer to travel with peers who can handle themselves,” Cassandra replied, maneuvering around a clutch of overlarge boulders in the path. Once beyond them, she turned in the saddle to watch the wagons take the detour. “Saves me the distraction of rescuing them from their own mistakes.”  
  
“Mistakes are such grand sculptors, though.” Leliana tossed her uneaten portion, rind and all, into the bushes. She sucked her fingertips, thoughtful, and spurred to follow Cassandra as she trotted far ahead. “Certainly you would not be here without yours.”

Knowing a thing did not mean understanding it. Few had the skill to teach Cassandra herself this, important as it was. Though, there was one who had cracked her hard head just enough, drove a dragon straight through it…  
  
“I’m here in spite of them,” she replied after a moment, shielding her eyes as they left the copse and entered a meadow. Clouds retreated as if chased, and she watched their grey ghosts caress the high switchgrass as they went.  
  
“You are in spite of many things, Cassandra,” said Leliana, slipping into the sun.

Their small caravan lumbered through the meadow and a group of startled flycatchers burst from the forest at the far edge of the clearing. Leliana followed them upward, eyes tracking, shadowed by the blade of her hand. And when she should have been halting the line, searching the forest, Cassandra was instead lingering on the curve of Leliana’s neck and the sweat gathered there. The wet shape of her hair, grown long, curling under her ear.  
  
She did not see the child until it was too late.  
  
If he’d been an archer, a genlock, or a very lucky bandit they’d be dead.  
  
He had perhaps eight years at most, and stood amid the ochre grass with bare feet and a dirty tunic, belted with rags, that hung to his knees. When she remembered to breathe, heart feathered and flight-torn in her chest as the birds had been, Cassandra looked quickly to Leliana beside her and back again.

She’d not drawn her bow, nor a second breath, since he appeared.  
  
The boy stared them down, blank and hard as uncarved wood save for his eyes. Deep in the filth he wore across his full cheeks, his eyes were ambergold and bright; Animal’s eyes, and something more, playful, that sent a wintery spasm the length of Cassandra’s spine.  
  
“Chasind,” Leliana said, more airless suck than sound issuing from her throat.  
  
“This far north?”   
  
Wind rolled through, sending the grass lapping against his small frame like a shorebreak. The child closed his eyes and stuck his nose into the wind, testing.  
  
Leliana’s horse shuffled backward, snorting, but her sudden smile was dreamlike as she cut a glance toward the shape of the book swinging inside Cassandra’s saddlebag.  
  
“Perhaps a dragon gave him a ride,” said Leliana.  
  
“It is more likely that he’s an escaped slave,” Cassandra replied, eyes rolling, and leaned as if to slip from the saddle. The boy didn’t flinch. She muttered sideways as she eased from her mount, “You know I really hate that dwarf.”  
  
“He would have made an excellent bard.” Leliana kept her seat, and kept her eyes on the child. “His weapon was quite impressive.”

As Cassandra stepped forward, a pace ahead of the horses, the boy’s head swiveled slowly. He marked her hand on the hilt of her sword as if appraising a gnat or a toad. And if she’d meant to achieve anything but dumbstruck gawking it was lost to the Void as an enormous figure crashed out of the treeline behind the dirty child.  
  
A shape of pitiless black, a bellowing bear wreathed in dust and thorns falling away from its shag, raced through the switchgrass toward the boy. Cassandra heard distant, hollow cries from her men above the stamp of spooked hooves. And yet the child stood grave-still.  
  
Before her steel could meet the light of day, Cassandra watched as the bear slowed, circled in front of the boy, body low, and he gripped the massive hanks of fur along its neck. He scrabbled high upon its back and rode the loping creature toward the greenblack depth of the forest with his rags flapping. As they were swallowed by the underbrush, he threw his long hair and cast her a backward smile. And then the bear’s massive backside disappeared.  
  
“Maker!” Cassandra heaved, feeling small inside her armor, inside the silent meadow, sunny and plain as before. At her back, the contingent stilled and the horses went to chewing meadowgrass.  
  
“What an exit!” Leliana spurred forward a little, reslinging the bow Cassandra had not even noticed her draw. She twirled her unspent arrow, looking at the boy’s abandoned spot in the grass. “I didn’t have the shot, she was so quick.”  
  
“She? You’re certain?”   
  
Desperate and hot, Cassandra searched the trees. They seemed thicker than before, less true. Galyan would remind her that magic makes everything into a question with more than one answer, even trees and bears. When is a child not a child? She’d seen them used for basic human weakness as much as magical.  
  
“He’s her cub, of course,” replied Leliana, breaking the league-long stare Cassandra had been lost to. “And such familiar eyes.”  
  
“We should track them.” She climbed back into her saddle, skin still crisp with singed pride, and rode back along the ranks to find a second archer and a young soldier with a maul. “You and you, come with me.”  
  
“Don’t,” said Leliana, putting her horse between Cassandra and treeline. “I know your penchant for pursuit, but that…” she said, face masked in elegant deflection and turned to the forest edge, “is not a fight you can win.”

The soldiers waited, half out of formation, and she felt herself narrow into a shard of white defiance. Leliana infuriated and cajoled her at every turn. From the shambles of the Champion’s home all the way through the Vinmarks, they agreed on little but the direction their noses pointed.  
  
But the woman she knew - and did not know, truly - had never served her own needs above her calling. Until she mastered the difference herself, Cassandra conceded that perhaps the Inquisitor would be less of a problem than her own ambitions.  
  
She jerked her head and the two soldiers fell back in line. The mystery of the boy and the bear having occupied less than five minutes of their journey, she wasn’t sure how to catalogue it or if reporting it would only bring her headaches. Cassandra nodded to herself and led the contingent across the meadow and onto the old path she hoped would deposit them into the Arlesans without further…excitement.  
  
Once the trees covered them again, and their horses stepped together in the dapple, Leliana stood in her stirrups and yanked another birnefruit from the lowest branch she could reach. The paring knife appeared again and Cassandra thought it looked less like a utensil than a lethal last-hope. When Leliana carved out a slice and held it for her, Cassandra shook her head.  
  
“You know something you haven’t shared,” she said. “Who were they?”  
  
Leliana ate, and drew her knife along the exposed flesh of the fruit, widening it even as it diminished.  
  
“A beautiful problem.”

**Author's Note:**

> for dreamer, who prompted me for these two. . .damn i wish i was better at their voices! <3


End file.
